Rose Colored Glasses

This is the painting that gave birth to theChildren by the Sea Series, which will eventually becomea line of uplifting greeting cards based on the healing power of​looking at life through a more childlike perspective.Original sold.

Rose Colored Glasses

by Ellen Rice

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Rose Colored Glasses was born of a time when I was going through a tremendous personal and physical crises period. I was in a long-standing mentally abusive marriage which had eventually worn me down to the point that I was falling apart physically.

It was pointed out to me by a newfound sister that women who don't get out of such circumstances often die from some ailment or another. She gave me a book that verified what she said.

Through prayer and the counsel of a Christian Science practitioner, I was able to see beyond the bounds of that marriage and find healing and freedom from the pain I'd been experiencing for three years.

The message that brought the greatest breakthrough was the verse in the Bible that reads:

"...Whosoever shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein." - Luke 17:18.

The verse was constantly in my thoughts, and as I pondered it, it came to me that it meant that to receive the realization of Heaven (to me then peace) required a pure, innocent, untarnished view of life.

I started working at seeing more of the good around me, made lists of the good I found, a gratitude list. Instead of seeing so many brown leaves and twigs on trees, I focused on the greens, the growth, the buds, the upward reaching branches.

As I did this in all the phases of my life, the physical healing came. The rest, the marriage would come later in ways I never expected as I continued to seek answers in prayer.

I sought a way to illustrate this verse that helped me so much and a little snapshot my mother took of my niece Rebecca in Rehoboth Beach one day after she'd put on her grandmother's sunglasses came to mind. They're painted blue to make the viewer ponder as I did. It is obvious that the "rose colored glasses" view she is seeing with her childlike thought has nothing to do with the color of her glasses.

May we all retain our "rose colored" view, see the good around us and reflect it in all we do.